Flow visualization is a topic that has received a lot of attention in the past. Many methods of visualizing flow data have been developed including, for example, direct streamline visualization (Alexander Köhn, Jan Klein, Florian Weiler, Heinz-Otto Peitgen, “A GPU-based Fiber Tracking Framework using Geometry Shaders”, Proc. SPIE, Vol. 7261, 72611J, 2009), ray-casting streamlines (Thomas Frühauf, “Raycasting vector fields”, IEEE Visualization Proceedings, 1996), or particle tracing (Jens Krüger, Peter Kipfer, Polina Kondratieva, Rüdiger Westermann, “A Particle System for Interactive Visualization of 3D Flows”, IEEE Transactions On Visualization And Computer Graphics, Vol. 11, No. 6, 11, 2005). These methods generate geometrical primitives, such as points or paths, flow vector fields or particle paths, which can be visualized with conventional computer graphics techniques.
The main shortcoming of the current solutions is that they do not provide ways of intuitively visualizing specific flow patterns. Often, many different flow patterns are mixed in the same image, contributing to the user confusion, especially when the user is not familiar with the mathematics involved in the flow analysis.